Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-06-11
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, far-right, government, policy, politics, social policy
The global resurgence of far-right populism over the past decade has posed a fundamental challenge to social protection systems built over generations of progressive reform. In Latin America, where welfare states remain fragile and inequality runs deep, the electoral success of far-right movements has raised urgent questions about the durability of redistributive programs — whether such governments dismantle legacy policies outright, hollow them out through gradual neglect, or, paradoxically, expand them for short-term political gain. Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022) offers one of the most analytically rich cases for examining these dynamics, particularly given the fate of Bolsa Família, the conditional cash transfer program that became a globally celebrated model of poverty reduction under the Workers' Party governments of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff. The article published in Latin American Perspectives examines how the COVID-19 pandemic served as a critical juncture that forced even an ideologically hostile government to reckon with the political logic of social transfers — while simultaneously reshaping that program in ways that reflected far-right political imperatives rather than development objectives.
The article's central analytical contribution lies in distinguishing between two modes of welfare-state change that are often conflated in the comparative politics literature: dismantling and drift. Dismantling refers to explicit, deliberate retrenchment — cutting funding, eliminating eligibility, abolishing programs. Drift, by contrast, occurs when policy frameworks remain nominally intact but are allowed to erode through non-adaptation, administrative neglect, or strategic redirection. The Bolsonaro government's treatment of Bolsa Família fits neither category cleanly, which is precisely what makes the case theoretically interesting. Rather than abolishing the program — which would have been politically suicidal given that its beneficiaries numbered in the tens of millions — the administration rebranded it as Auxílio Brasil in late 2021, expanded its nominal benefit levels in the run-up to the 2022 election, and stripped away the conditionalities and monitoring mechanisms that had given the original program much of its developmental coherence. The result was a program that was simultaneously larger in fiscal footprint and weaker in institutional architecture: a social transfer system shaped more by electoral timing than by anti-poverty logic.
The COVID-19 crisis is indispensable to understanding this trajectory. When the pandemic struck in 2020, Bolsonaro's initial response was dismissive and ideologically coherent with his broader skepticism of state intervention — he famously downplayed the virus's severity and resisted lockdowns. Yet the economic collapse forced the government's hand. The emergency cash transfer program, Auxílio Emergencial, was introduced in April 2020 and became one of the largest fiscal interventions in Brazilian history, temporarily lifting millions out of poverty and — according to a range of Brazilian economists — actually reversing inequality trends in the short term despite being administered by a government openly hostile to redistributive policy. The article uses this episode to illuminate a broader truth about far-right governance: ideological commitments to small government and market discipline are frequently suspended when political survival is at stake. The pandemic did not transform Bolsonaro into a redistributivist; it revealed the limits of ideological consistency when faced with mass economic precarity and electoral vulnerability. Auxílio Brasil, introduced as the emergency program wound down, can be read as an attempt to institutionalize the political benefits of cash transfers without preserving their developmental infrastructure.
This case resonates with broader trends across the global South in how right-wing and populist governments navigate inherited social contracts. In contexts ranging from India's BJP to Turkey's AKP, scholars have documented a pattern in which governments initially skeptical of redistribution adopt targeted cash transfers not as poverty reduction tools but as instruments of electoral clientelism — maintaining visibility and personal attribution of benefits while undermining the bureaucratic and civil society intermediaries that had made earlier programs effective. What distinguishes the Brazilian case is the degree to which the transformation was conducted in real time and under close public scrutiny, making it an unusually transparent case study in how social policy can be simultaneously preserved in form and gutted in function. For researchers in development studies and comparative welfare-state analysis, this points to the limitations of measuring social protection solely through expenditure levels or beneficiary headcounts — metrics that can obscure profound qualitative changes in program governance, conditionality, and targeting.
The policy implications of this analysis extend well beyond Brazil. For international development organizations that have invested substantially in promoting conditional cash transfer programs as scalable, evidence-based interventions, the Bolsonaro period raises important questions about institutional resilience. Programs that depend heavily on strong administrative infrastructure, inter-ministerial coordination, and civil society monitoring — all features that made Bolsa Família effective — are particularly vulnerable to drift when governments are indifferent or hostile to those institutional foundations. The redesign of Auxílio Brasil effectively decoupled benefit delivery from health and education conditionalities, undermining the human capital rationale that had made conditional cash transfers attractive to multilateral lenders and donors. This has implications for how ODA actors design and evaluate social protection programs: sustainability cannot be measured only by fiscal continuity but must include assessments of institutional coherence, civil society engagement, and the robustness of monitoring systems across political transitions.
Looking forward, the restoration of Bolsa Família under Lula's third administration beginning in 2023 — with expanded benefit levels and reinvigorated conditionalities — provides a natural comparison point that researchers and practitioners should examine closely. Whether the institutional degradation of the Bolsonaro years can be reversed, and how quickly, will speak directly to questions about the reversibility of welfare-state drift and the conditions under which political transitions can restore developmental coherence to hollowed-out programs. For civil society organizations operating in Brazil and analogous contexts across Latin America, the episode underscores the importance of maintaining monitoring capacity and advocacy infrastructure even during hostile political environments, since these actors proved critical in documenting the program's deterioration and mobilizing the policy agenda for restoration. For the broader scholarly community working on the intersection of populism, social policy, and democratic governance, the Bolsonaro-era transformation of Bolsa Família will remain a landmark case — one that complicates simple narratives of welfare-state retrenchment and demands more nuanced frameworks for understanding how far-right governments engage with, rather than simply demolish, the redistributive legacies they inherit.